MariaDB OpenWorks was an ocean of Galera Cluster activity

MariaDB OpenWorks happened February 25 – 27, 2019 in New York City. It was filled with plenty of activity.

The keynote by Michael Howard, C.E.O. of MariaDB, is an interesting watch, one with many quoted articles especially around “strip-mining open-source technologies and companies,” and “abusing the license and privilege, and not giving back to the community.” Many articles were written about this topic, and it’s clear that open-source has arrived considering all of the success around the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, the Elastic I.P.O., the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, the SalesForce acquisition fo MuleSoft and the MongoDB I.P.O.

Auto Europe has a three node Galera Cluster running their MariaDB installation. One of those nodes is in a separate data center from the other two, so even if an entire data center goes down, Auto Europe is still up.

It only took two days of consulting to get them up to speed!

Nokia Networks’ Rick Lane is also a happy user of Galera Cluster, as you can see in the video Deploying MariaDB Databases with Containers at Nokia Networks. At about 14 minutes in, you’ll note that their MariaDB container supports deployment of all configurations, including Galera Cluster. At 35:40, he goes into Galera Cluster healing and the challenges they faced getting this going. There is also Galera Cluster scaling shortly thereafter — scale out, and “scaling in” (i.e., shrinking the cluster size, but no less than three nodes).

The video by CCV, a Dutch payment processor and loyalty processor, CCV: Migrating our Payment Processing System to MariaDB is also a great watch. They migrated from SQL Server 2008, have two data centers, and use five Galera Cluster nodes per data center. The best quote from the video: “MariaDB, together with Galera [Cluster], is a really good fit for disaster recovery and near zero downtime. You can roll a data change right through the Galera Cluster, starting on the first node and to the fifth node, and that fits us well.”

There were many people coming to the Galera Cluster booth at the Expo Hall. Overall, we’re looking forward to MariaDB OpenWorks 2020!